About me

This blogname was derived from the novel The Secret Life Of Saeed The Pessoptimist by the Palestinian Israeli Emile Habiby: absurdism as weapon against the (ir)realities of daily life in Palestine/Israel. (The subtitle is from a book by Dutch author Renate Rubinstein. It could as well be my motto).
My real name is Martin (Maarten Jan) Hijmans. I've been covering the ME since 1977 and have been a correspondent in Cairo. I started my 'Abu Pessoptimist' blog in January 2009 out of anger during the onslaught in Gaza. The other one, The Pessoptmist, is meant to be a sister version in English. (En voor de Nederlandstaligen: ik wilde in november 2009 een tweede blog in het Engels beginnen en ontdekte te laat dat als je één account hebt, een profiel dan meteen ook voor allebei de blogs geldt. Vandaar dat het nu ineens in het Engels is... So sorry.)

Saturday, March 4, 2017

Jordan hangs 15 people, 10 of them ''terrorists''

Troops closed the entrances to Irbid during a firefight with the ''Ibid terror cell'' in March 2016.

Jordan hanged 15 death row prisoners at dawn on Saturday, in a further break
with a moratorium on executions it had observed between 2006 and 2014. Ten were convicted of "terror" offences, including attacks
on tourists, a writer, and security forces. Five others were convicted
of crimes including rape, Mahmud al-Momani, Jordanian information minister told the official Petra news agency. The group of 10 were part of the so-called "Irbid terror cell", which was responsible for several attacks.
In 2005, King Abdullah II said Jordan aimed to become the first Middle Eastern country to stop carrying out executions, in line with most European countries. Courts continued to hand down death sentences, but they were not carried out. But public opinion blamed a rise in crime on the policy and in December 2014 Jordan hanged 11 men convicted of murder, drawing criticism from human rights groups. Opinion hardened after the murder by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS) group of captured Jordanian pilot Maaz al-Kassasbeh whose plane had crashed in a rebel-held region of Syria in December 2014. Grisly footage posted in February the following year of him being burned alive in a cage outraged the public.